another engine

Dad stayed in the trucking business a long time before going back to building houses.

After he was pretty well healed from the accident with the two engined truck, he went out looking for a buyer for the tanker. The Tankers are pretty tough trailers and after some tires and brakes and such, it was road worthy again.

Instead he was offered a job landed with it. But today’s story is not about that deal, though there were some interesting details.

Dad began hauling wheat from southern Idaho to Portland, where it was shipped to asia. Most of the wheat we grow in the NW is soft wheat, which makes great pasta and noodles, but not great bread. So most of our production goes over seas.

He also started a wholesale lumber business so he would have that magic back haul. He still ran Fords, big hulking beasts by pickup standards, but much smaller than the Kenworths and Peterbuilts.

The weight rules were lower then than now and he was sure he could haul enough more load than the big guys to make the operation profitable.

But his Fords were underpowered again. He had one pretty decent pass to go over and a lot of up and down road, so he got to thinking and buying parts.

First he built a single axle (but with duals on each side so it had 4 tires/wheels With that he could pul the maximum allowed by the law he had the extra axles that were required. But that extra 15,000 pounds slowed the truck down.

So he bought a used Cadillac engine along with a Hydromatic transmission. Then he glued that engine into the trailer. He ran wires clear up to the cab so he could control the motor as well as monitor the engine.

I drove that rig a bit, and when you put in the clutch to shift gears, usually the whole truck would slow down, but with that Cadillac engine it kept on going.

I do not remember how long he ran that rig, but I think it was a year or so. Then the great state of Oregon set up a new rule, pretty much tailored to make his trailer obsolete and illegal.

The ruling was simply that every engine had to have a driver. And dad’s did not. There is some logic to what they did of course.

I do not know what happened to that rig. My guess is that it got disassembled and the parts used in a whole bunch of new projects.